The Strategic Web Designer by Christopher Butler

Author:Christopher Butler [Butler, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4403-1504-6
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2012-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

3. How many of my site’s visitors leave unsatisfied?

User satisfaction is often expressed in terms of a website’s bounce rate, one of the most misunderstood metrics you’ll encounter in Google Analytics. Put simply, the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who entered your site but did not continue browsing it, either because their browsing session expired or because they left your site without visiting any other pages. Consequently, conventional wisdom deems the lower the bounce rate, the better. After all, the idea is to gain and keep visitors. A high bounce rate can be the result of web pages with poorly optimized metadata, which can give search engines and their users a false sense of what they’re actually about. If a user searches for one thing and lands on a page that is hardly related to her query, it makes sense that she wouldn’t stick around. This is why a website’s bounce rate is typically seen as an indicator of user satisfaction. However, larger sites - both in terms of content and traffic - are likely to have high bounce rates even if most users are satisfied. The more pages a website contains, the wider its topical scope is likely to be, which in turn will attract users with all kinds of needs that, while they may be addressed by individual pages, are not in line with the site’s overall purpose. For example, a user may find an isolated article about web typography helpful or interesting, but that user may not explore the site that contains it any further if they’re not actually looking to hire the designer who wrote it. Such a user would register as a bounce, but who’s to say that she was unsatisfied? Perhaps she will return again someday, when she needs a designer, or refer someone else to the website. As we learned in chapter 3, the mind of the audience is mysterious, and not all website content should be created for a single persona. Today’s influencers, though their activity may increase a website’s bounce rate, are quite possibly tomorrow’s decision makers. It’s troubling enough that a website’s bounce rate is so often qualitatively misunderstood, but sadly it is just as often quantitatively misunderstood. I’ll explain how bounce rate percentages properly apply to website traffic numbers later in this chapter, in the section on Understanding Bounce Rate (page 95).

These three questions are what you might consider “Measurement 101.” But what if you want to go deeper? As I mentioned earlier, the best way to do that is to gather data and assemble custom reports based upon your finely tuned and informed questioning.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.